I got a text from a friend of mine asking to go see Remember Me about an hour later.  I’d heard mixed reviews and figured it might as well be worth a watch.  I went into the movie expecting Robert Pattinson to fall madly in love with a girl and look at her from the corner of his eye for two hours, and I was pleasantly surprised that his inability to look directly at people worked well with his character, a 22-year-old college student who only audits his classes with no plans of graduating.  He has no ideas what to do with his life.  Discovering his older brother after he committed suicide causes Pattinson’s character into gambit against his father and caused him to refuse to make any decisions concerning his future.  He meets his young female companion through a bet to get back at her father, a cop who had beat the shit out Pattinson the night before.  The two fall in love however.  This story is told time and time again, but it worked well in the context.  The girl’s father is bitter and overprotective of his daughter as his wife/her mother was shot in cold blood before her eyes when she was eleven.

The movie plays out as one would expect; Pattinson and the father get into an argument, Pattinson confesses his lie to the girl. She gets upset and leaves, but later forgives him.  The movie nearly comes full circle when Pattinson’s father, played by Pierce Brosnan, begins to pay more attention to family matters after a rather traumatic incident with his young daughter.  Because of the incident, Pattinson has to meet with lawyers in his father’s office.

This is where the movie turns to utter shit, rendering it unwatchable.  This is the first movie I’ve almost walked out of, ever.  The movie takes place throughout 2001, and this is unimportant for most of the movie.  At the end however, the camera zooms out from Pattinson looking out of the window of his father’s office to show him in the World Trade Center.  The date “September 11, 2001” appears at the bottom of the screen.  At this point the entire theater groans in unison.  The movie ends showing reactions from all the characters to the towers falling, knowing Pattinson is inside, and Pattinson reads a letter to his deceased brother.

I have no problem with the use of tragedy in movies, but it had not place here.  It was in terrible taste and added nothing to the movie other than forcing cheap tears from the audience.  Pattinson needed to die at the end, there is no way around that.  It was needed for the movie to come full-circle.  A more fitting way for this to have occurred would have been for him to have been shot on the subway however.  It would have stayed within the plot, rather than adding in a real occurrence to force emotion downt he throats of the audience.

F-

yes, F-